The State of the Semantic Web

In the DERI blog I have found a rather interesting presentation from Ivan Herman, (W3C) Semantic Web Activity Leader, about the current state of the semantic web, given at the International Conference on Semantic Web & Digital Libraries in Bangalore, India.

He also gives some insight in what has been achieved concerning language standardization (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.), already existing vocabularies, current implementations and available knowledge databases (ontologies).

Besides all the achievments of the recent years, Ivan also points out where the deficiencies are:

• how to bind to different communities (e.g., the “digital library world”)


• how (and where from) to get RDF data


• several stil missing functionalitiessuch as rules, “light” ontologies, fuzzy reasoning, necessity to review RDF and OWL,…


• different misconceptions, existing messaging problems
• 
  
• and of course the need for more applications, more deployment, and also acceptance

To get more working applications the porting of alreay existing knowledge resources (as already existing classification schemes, lexicons, htesauri, etc.) into the context of the semantic web is mandatory. SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) is one of the W3C activities that has exactely this purpose. SKOS is built on top of RDF and serves as a formal language for representing structured well defined vocabularies.

International Semantic Web Conference 2006 (ISWC 2006), Athens (GA), USA - Day 3

Thursday, the last day of ISWC started with a keynote of Rudi Studer from the University of Karlsruhe on 'The Semantic Web: Suppliers and Customers'. He drew the historic connection from databases to the Semantic web as being a web of human-readable content connected to machine-interpretable semantic resources. He also pointed out the importance of interdisciplinary research for realizing the Semantic Web, while on the other hand, the Semantic Web also contributes to other disciplines and comunities. After that I was listening to an interesting talk of Andreas Harth from DERI on 'Crawling and Indexing the Semantic Web', where he introduced an architecture for a semantic web crawler and gave some first results.
The most interesting talk of the day was the talk of Ivan Herman from W3C (here you can find his foaf data) on 'Semantic Web @ W3C: Activities, Recommendations and State of Adoption'. He proposed 2007 to be the 'year of rules', because finally, we might come to a recommendation concerning rule languages for the Semantic Web. He also mentioned the efforts of integrating RDF data into XHTML via RDFa or - vice versa - to get RDF data out of XHTML with GRDDL.
The ISWC closed with the announcement of the best paper awards and the winners of theis year's semantic web challenge.
If you are interested in the conference, you might have a look at the video recordings of the talks.